How product seeding helped a pet apparel brand build and scale its influencer marketing program
Frenchie Bulldog is a popular pet lifestyle brand and the original creator of the reversible dog harness. The company’s mission was to create adorable, colorful apparel, collars, and harnesses that would fit robust small and medium-sized dogs–like Frenchies. Today, Frenchie Bulldog is one of the most popular dog apparel brands on the market.
Early in the brand’s existence, founder Bridget Levine put great effort into creating a community. She reached out to many dog lovers on Instagram and formed some great relationships that ended up being the foundation of the brand’s influencer marketing program. She even started to host Frenchie Bulldog community meetups offline.
influencers in their program
Influencer-generated content pieces
Thread of email communication
Once Victoria Shanley joined the Frenchie Bulldog team as Director of Operations and Marketing, she took ownership of these early relationships. One of her first actions was inviting them to become official members of the influencer marketing program. From there, the influencer program took off.
While gathering content was the most pressing goal, there was also a need to grow brand awareness. With over 90 dedicated creators and 30 celebrity endorsers, there were many opportunities for increasing brand exposure. Victoria managed the 90+ creators using a color-coded Google spreadsheet. But soon realized that there were some definite drawbacks to this method.
The original goal for Frenchie Bulldog’s influencer program was content creation.
“I needed content. I only post our influencers, so when I only had those photos to work with, I needed to quickly and efficiently grow that group of people. All that content they’re creating is what I post on social media. So if I’m posting six times a day, I need to make sure that those influencers are pumping out content for me. I needed photos, and I needed them quick!” – Victoria Shanley, Director of Operations & Marketing
When we were first introduced to GRIN, I’d looked at other companies. But the second you guys told me that my Shopify orders were automatically going to get created by the influencer and then pushed into our Shopify site, I had the pen ready to sign. I cannot tell you how many hours I spent creating those orders to have them shipped out.
– Victoria Shanley, Director of Operations & Marketing
GRIN’s all-in-one Creator Management platform offered a powerful solution to all of Frenchie Bulldog’s influencer marketing troubles. One of their favorite features was the Shopify integration, which allowed Victoria to fulfill influencer orders directly from GRIN without having to login to Shopify. This feature saved a tremendous amount of time by eliminating the need to process product orders manually.
Another great feature was GRIN’s ability to create content usage agreements right within the program. Before using this feature, they lacked a way to handle this crucial part of the process correctly. GRIN’s usage agreement terms ensured that everyone was clear on the details, and gave the influencer program a greater sense of professionalism and legitimacy.
Finally, GRIN centralized communications , eliminating the confusing jumble of communication methods. Now, all communication takes place on the platform, which saves a lot of time and headaches.
After a short time using GRIN, there was an improved ROI from the influencer marketing program. Frenchie Bulldog’s marketers were also able to level up the program to new heights.
With GRIN, Frenchie Bulldog can also easily repurpose the same user-generated content that fills their social media feeds as paid Facebook ads and on other marketing channels. Getting these fabulous photos is extremely important in making their comprehensive marketing plan work.
While also ramping up its use of paid media through Facebook ads. The same user-generated content that fills their social media feeds can be repurposed as paid Facebook ads. They can also use them on the website. Getting these fabulous photos is extremely important in making their comprehensive marketing plan work.
